Kitabı oku: «The Spell of Switzerland», sayfa 10
CHAPTER XIII
SUNRISE AND ROUSSEAU
THE weather showed unusual good humour by clearing in the night. Geneva woke up to bright sparkling sunshine. I went out before breakfast, indeed before sunrise, on the bridge, and had a most glorious view up the lake and up to the very summit of Mont Blanc. White as sugar, it lifted its aerial head into the azure – a solid cloud which looked as if it might at any moment take wings and fly away. A well-informed policeman told me the names of the other peaks: L’Aiguille du Midi, nearly a thousand meters lower than the crowning height: La Dent du Géant; Les Grandes Jorasses (from that same word, joux, meaning rock); Les Aiguilles Rouges; La Mole, contrasting with the sharp peak of the Aiguille d’Argentière, rightly suggesting silver. If any one is satisfied with a distant prospect of mountains, his eye would never weary of that glorious sight; but there is an attractive power in the great mountain-masses. They beckon, they say: – “Come to us; we want you; you are ours.”
That is, however, a wholly modern conception. If in the old days human consciousness felt the call, heard the summons, it was with the horror with which a bird feels the impulse to fly into the serpent’s jaws. Not so many years ago the popular imagination filled the ravines of the higher mountains with other terrors besides the frost. Dragons haunted caverns; with bated breath men told of having seen the dance of Wotan on the Diablerets, or of having heard fiends playing nine-pins with great stones which, when they missed their mark, went dashing and crashing down into the valleys. What herdsman would dare approach the Grotte de Balme, that cavern, hollowed out in the limestone rock, where dark-skinned fairies, with no heels to their feet, but with long, rippling hair, lured young men to their destruction! There was the spectral ram of Monthey; there was the three-legged horse of Sion; there was the giant ox of Zauchet, with glowing horns and flaming torch of a tail; there was the blue-haired donkey of Zermatt. Down from the mountains to Neuchâtel there used to come a ghost, wearing a cloth dripping with blood, and vanishing toward the lake. It was that of the widow of Walther, Comte de Rochefort, publicly accused of forgery and beheaded in 1412. The sight of her presaged a conflagration.
The Lord of Grimmelstein killed a doe and her fawns and was condemned to hunt through the mountains – one of those famous Wild Hunts which are accompanied by terrible tempests, and overwhelming snows.
There was a herd of chamois tended by dwarfs. Woe to those hunters who killed too many!
As in Schiller’s poem, the gazelle climbs to the ruggedest top of the naked precipice with the huntsman close behind and, just as he is about to fit the arrow to the string, the ancient Spirit of the Mountain, the good Genius of the trembling creature, appears to him: – “Earth has room for all to dwell – Why chase my belov’d gazelle?”
At the entrance of the Rhône into the lake there used to be low banks and wandering islands. Here dwelt the nixies and their queen, Finetta of the White Hand. She wore lilies in her golden hair. Any one who saw her was sure to die within a year.
That most delightful and poetic and enthusiastic of mountain-climbers, Emile Javelle, made friends with the guides and herdsmen, and was for ever eliciting from them avowals of their belief in spirits and dragons. He says that any night passed among the good herdsmen of Salanfe, under the Dent du Midi, will be rich in old tales, and he thus relates the legend of the Monster of the Jorat: —
“The herdsmen tell me that formerly (some even think they can recall the time) there dwelt on the Col du Jorat, a monster, a dragon, in fine an animal of unknown species and horrible aspect, who guarded the passage of the Col by night. He had already claimed many victims and the boldest hunters dared not attack him. Night having fallen, he descended from the glacier. He reigned over the whole mountain, and woe betide the man who approached the Jorat.
“One day, at last, a man of the Rhône valley had been condemned to death. He possessed uncommon strength and boldness. Pardon was offered him on condition that he should fight the monster and succeed in destroying him. He accepted, climbed up to Salanfe, waited for night and mounted the path of the Jorat. It is said that the battle was terrible; but the man was victorious and tranquillity was after that restored to the pastures of Salanfe.”
Javelle explained the reluctance of the mountaineers at climbing to the upper heights by this universal belief in supernatural powers, and he explained the belief in these supernatural powers by their very familiarity with the strange phenomena of the mountains: – “They see the boulders come rolling down from the cliffs, the avalanches breaking off from the heights and dashing down to demolish their châlets – in the heights originate the storms; and there also they hear those mysterious crackings of the glacier. It is not strange that such phenomena should be explained by them in legends.”
Their imagination, too, is shown in the various names which they confer on the Devil. He is Lo Grabbi, the Miser; La Bêta Crotze (Bête-à-griffe), the beast with claws; Le Niton, the Tricky One; Lo Tannai, Cavern-haunter; L’Ozé or Lo Maffi, the Sly One; Lo To-frou, the Always Abroad. One of his assistants is the Nion-neloû (Nul-ne-l’entend), who hides behind trees and jumps out to scare horses. The Diablerets are the very stamping-ground of dwarfs, gnomes, and dragons. When a pinnacle is doomed to fall, they quarrel as to its direction. At Rubli these supernatural beings are called gommes: they guard mines; at night they are seen as meteors going from place to place.
Whence came the great heaps of stones, as for instance at the foot of Jolimont? We know that these vast masses, often of a different kind of rock from that characteristic of the locality, were brought down by glaciers; but the ignorant peasants attribute them to Satan, who, of course, was intending to crush some Christian church with them, but, perhaps through catching sight of a cross, was compelled to drop them. Some of these stones are of enormous size – the Plowstone, for instance, which rises almost twenty meters (sixty feet) above the ground between Erlenbach and Wetzweil and has been traced to its original source in the canton of Glarus.
But there is one more than twice as big at Montet, near Devent, and when, later, we were going over the Monte Moro pass, we saw one near the Mattmark See which it is estimated contains two hundred and forty thousand cubic feet of Serpentine. Clever old Devil to get rid of his burden! The Swiss Government now prohibits breaking up these blocks of stone for building purposes. This was due to the initiative of the Swiss Scientific Societies.
Forbes, in his “Travels through the Alps of Savoy,” gives a very good description of these masses of rock as seen at Monthey, overlooking the valley of the Rhône: —
“We have here a belt or band of blocks – poised, as it were, on a mountain-side, it may be five hundred feet above the alluvial flat through which the Rhône winds below. This belt has no great vertical height, but extends for miles – yes, for miles – along the mountain, composed of blocks of granite of thirty, forty, fifty, and sixty feet to the side, not a few, but by hundreds, fantastically balanced on the angles of one another, their gray weather-beaten tops standing out in prominent relief from the verdant slope of secondary formation on which they rest. For three or four miles there is a path, preserving nearly the same level, leading amidst the gnarled stems of ancient chestnut-trees which struggle round and among the pile of blocks, which leaves them barely room to grow: so that numberless combinations of wood and rock are formed where a landscape-painter might spend days in study and enjoyment.”
The very Pierres de Niton which entered into the foreground of the picture which I was contemplating have been traced to the Saint Bernard, and it is estimated that it took a thousand years for the glacier to bring them down from that height and deposit them in what is now the lake.
As I stood there I was especially led to think of the influence that Jean-Jacques Rousseau is supposed to have exerted in stimulating people to enjoy the grander aspects of Nature. Literature, before Rousseau’s time, has little to say of the beauty of mountains. They were regarded with annoyance as obstacles, with terror as filled with dangers. Joseph Addison, speaking of the Savoy Alps, says they are “broken into so many steeps and precipices that they fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror and form one of the most irregular, mis-shapen scenes in the world.”
I am not sure but Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who became Baron d’Aubonne, from the name of his estate near Geneva, does not deserve priority. After he had ended his travels in the Far East and had decided to settle in Switzerland he wrote his friends in Paris of his choice:
“Friends, I have long been looking for a country-house where to end my life in tranquillity.
“Now you would doubtless choose France; it is the loveliest country in the world; no other approaches it.
“Gentlemen, France is a charming, delightful country, I agree with you, … but my heart and my eyes are in Switzerland.
“‘What! That country of ice and sterile mountains, whose inhabitants would not have a quarter of the subsistence necessary for them, if other countries did not support a large part of its inhabitants!’
“You know Switzerland very well, as I can see. Gentlemen, such as it is, for me it is the loveliest country in the world.”
It was one of the boasts before Rousseau’s time that a seigneur’s place should have no view. Both Madame de Genlis, in Voltaire’s lifetime, and James Fenimore Cooper, fifty years after the great Frenchman’s death, noticed the fact that the view from Ferney was quite cut off by shrubbery, evidently showing that he cared little for it. Madame de Staël, though she was sympathetic enough with Rousseau, cared little for natural scenery. When some enthusiastic visitors were praising the beauties of Lake Leman she exclaimed: – “Oh for the gutters of the Rue de Bac.”
But, after all, it is only fair to give Rousseau’s own words, his invitation to the world to come to Switzerland and share with him these marvellous scenes. They are eloquent words, indeed! Nor did they fall on unheeding ears.
“I conduct you to the loftiest mountains of the old world, to the most ancient laboratory of Nature, where she operated with boundless energy before man existed, and where she produces objects of inexpressible sublimity and beauty, now that there are mortals to admire them. I conduct you to the secret sources of the rivers that irrigate and fertilize half Europe. I conduct you on one and the same day from the scorching heat of Spain to the cold of Lapland or Spitzbergen; from the vine and the chestnut-tree to the Alpine rose, and from the Alpine rose to the last insignificant moss that grows on the extreme verge of animated Nature.
“You shall find fragrance in flowers, which in the valleys yield no scent; you shall pluck strawberries on the margin of everlasting ice.
“I conduct you to the fountain of the dews and rains that dispense blessings over half our quarter of the globe; to the birthplace of refreshing breezes and of storms which temper and purify the atmosphere.
“I conduct you to the clearest and freshest springs, the most magnificent water-falls, the most extensive glaciers, the most stupendous snow-clad mountains and the most fertile pastures. The tremendous avalanche shall pursue before you its thundering career.
“The brilliant crystal, the swift chamois, the harmless marmot, the soaring eagle, the rapacious vulture, as unusual objects, will strike your eye and excite pleasure and admiration.
“From the toiling husbandman you will ascend to the happy cowherd. Innumerable flocks of cattle, of extraordinary beauty and spirit, will bound about you. In the foaming milk and the clotted cream you will taste of the riches of the country which are poured forth into the most distant regions.
“But, above all, you will be delighted with the inhabitants, men of rare symmetry of form, active and robust, cheerful and independent, – women, decked with unsophisticated charms and graces and manifesting the childlike curiosity and the engaging confidence of the ancient ages of innocence.
“Old traditions and rural songs will meet your ear, and the picture presented in the idyls of Theocritus will be realized, but on a grander scale and with more diversified accompaniments.
“Lastly, in those elevated regions you will yourself become better; you will verify the promise of the moral philosopher; you will feel greater facility of respiration, more suppleness and vigor of body, and greater buoyancy of spirits. All the passions are here softened down and pleasure is less intense. The mind is led into a grand and sublime train of thought, suited to the objects which surround us; it is filled with a certain calm delight unalloyed with anything that is painful or sensual. It seems as if in rising above the habitations of men we left behind us all base and earthly feelings; and as if the soul in approaching nearer to the ethereal heaven acquired somewhat of its unruffled serenity.”
And quite à propos, it seems to me, here is Rousseau’s famous description of the sunrise:
“Let us betake ourselves to some lofty place before the Sun appears. We see him announced from afar by the fiery darts which he sends before him. The fire increases; the east seems all in flames. By their dazzling splendor one looks for the orb long before it shows itself. Each instant one thinks to see it appear. There it is at last! A brilliant point shoots off like a flash and instantly fills all space…
“The veil of darkness is rent and falls; man recognizes his dwelling-place and finds it ever-more more beautiful. During the night the verdure has taken on new vigor; the dawning day which lights it, the first rays which gild it, bring it before us with a glittering panoply of dew, flashing brilliant colors into our eyes. The birds join in chorus and salute the father of life. The concourse of all these objects brings to the senses an impression of freshness which seems to penetrate into the depths of the soul. Here is a half-hour of enchantment which no man can resist. A spectacle so grand, so beautiful, so delicious, leaves no one unmoved.”
Rousseau attributed his love of Nature to the two peaceful years which he spent at the parsonage at Borsey, developing as they did his taste and enabling him later to bring about a complete revolution in the esthetic and literary tendencies of the century. If Rousseau got up to see a sunrise, why, then it became the fashion to get up and see sunrises; if Rousseau went to a high mountain-top, then it became fashionable to go to high mountain-tops. Here is his recipe for mountain-climbing, written after he had made an excursion on foot to Valais in the Autumn of 1759: —
“I gradually realized that the purity of the air was the real cause of the return of that interior peace which I had lost so long. In fact on high mountains, where the air is pure and subtle, we feel a greater facility in breathing, greater physical lightness, greater mental serenity. Our meditations take on a peculiar character of grandeur and sublimity, proportioned to the objects surrounding us. It seems as if in rising above the dwellings of men, we left behind all low and terrestrial thoughts and, in proportion as we approach the upper regions, the soul attains something of their changeless purity. Here we are grave, but not melancholy; peaceful, but not indolent; simply content to be and to think. I doubt if any violent agitation, if any maladie des vapeurs could resist such a sojourn if prolonged, and I am amazed that baths in the wholesome and beneficent mountain-air are not one of the sovereign remedies of medicine and morals.”
The same idea is found in quaint lines in a Mountain Poem by Usteri:
“Uf Bergen, uf Bergen
Da isch’s eim so wohl
De Berg is de Doktor
Für Seel und für Lyb!”
Alexander Pope and other old English writers are always talking about fits of “vapours.” I wonder how the name arose, and why it went out of style. Vapour comes from water, tears are water; hence vapours, – perhaps that is the logic of the term. Of course then they would evaporate in the dry mountain-air.
I recollected how Rousseau loved this very lake. I remembered his apostrophe to it after he had been out sailing on it: —
“As we skirted the shores, I admired the rich and charming landscapes of the Pays de Vaud, where the hosts of villages, the green and well-kept terraces on all sides form a ravishing picture; where the land, everywhere cultivated and everywhere fertile, offers the plowman, the herdman, the vintner the assured fruit of their labors, not devoured as elsewhere by the grasping tax-collector… The lake was calm. I kept perfect silence. The even and measured noise of the oars set me to dreaming. A cloudless sky, the coolness of the air, the sweet rays of the moon, the silvery shimmer of the water shining around us, filled me with the most delicious sensations. Oh, my lake! thou hast a charm which I cannot explain, which does not arise wholly from the beauty of the scene, but from something more interesting, which affects me and touches me. When the eager desire of this sweet and happy life for which I was born comes to kindle my imagination, it always attaches itself to the lake.”
And then again his poignant cry of farewell:
“Oh, my lake, on the shores of which I spent the peaceful years of mine infancy, charming landscapes where for the first time I witnessed the majestic and touching sunrise, where I felt the first emotions of my heart, the first impulse of genius, alas! become too imperious… Oh, my lake, I shall never see thee more.”
CHAPTER XIV
THE CITY OF ROUSSEAU AND CALVIN
APPARENTLY Geneva is prouder of being the Mother of Rousseau than of having adopted Calvin. Both were exiled – Calvin by his enemies; Rousseau by his worst enemy, himself. Calvin, having settled the basis of his theology, built himself on it, never shaken; Rousseau canted and recanted and rerecanted. He was a Protestant; he was a Catholic; he was a free-thinker; he was a deist.
Once, at Madame d’Epinay’s, Saint Lambert avowed himself an atheist. Rousseau exclaimed: – “If it is cowardice to allow anyone to say ill about an absent friend, then it is a crime to allow anyone to say evil of his God who is present, and, gentlemen, I believe in God.”
Saint Lambert indulged in still another sneering remark and Rousseau threatened to leave if anything more of the kind were said.
Curiously enough, Rousseau, who was a stickler for free speech, sided against Voltaire in his battle against Calvinism. He saw that the great scoffer wanted to upset the habits and customs of Calvin’s city, to introduce a love of pleasure and of luxury and especially of the theatre. He wrote: —
“So Voltaire’s weapons are satire, black falsehood, and libels. Thus he repays the hospitality which Geneva by a fatal indulgence has shown him. This fanfaron of impiety, this lofty genius and this low soul, this man so great through his talents, so base (vil) in his use of them, will leave long and cruel memories among us. Ridicule, that poison of good sense and of uprightness, satire, enemy of the public peace, flabbiness, arrogant pomp will henceforth make a people of trivialities, of buffoons, of wits, of commerce, who in place of the consideration once enjoyed by our literary men will put Geneva on the level of the Academies of Marseilles and of Angers.”
This letter was widely circulated. Voltaire, who might have been more offended by its lack of style than by its attack on him, henceforth used every opportunity to injure and insult Rousseau.
When “Emile” appeared it shocked the theologians. The City ordered it to be burned by the official hangman. The Church said to him: – “You extol the excellence of the Gospel yet you destroy its dogmas. You paint the beauty of the virtues yet you snuff them out in the souls of your readers.” He was even condemned by Parliament to be imprisoned. The pious Jacob Vernet, Pastor Mouton and Pastor Vernes wrote him letters expressing their admiration of his talents but criticizing some of his views. After he published his “Lettres de la Montagne,” which caused a terrible hubbub, Vernes, Chapuis and Claparède publicly attacked him.
Voltaire wrote: – “Grand and edifying spectacle presented by the venerable Company of Pastors at Geneva! While the Government is burning Rousseau’s books, the clergy approves of them and finds itself very happy to be reduced to a natural religion which proves nothing and asks little.”
And those that stoned the prophets raise monuments to them. Calvin, whom Rousseau called “esprit dur et farouche,” has no monument, unless a street named after him may be considered as one; but Rousseau has a whole island with a big bronze statue on it and a street besides.
This is the substance of our breakfast-table conversation. When we had finished our coffee and rolls we started out for a long walk. Ruth, like a woman, wanted to look at the shops; Will and I would go hunting for Rousseau and Calvin.
For a long time a house in Geneva bore the inscription: —
ICI EST NE
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
LE 28 JUIN
1712
But that was a mistake. It is now known that he was born in his father’s house, Number 2, Grand’ Rue, and there he lived till 1719. Then he went to live at 73, Rue de Constance. His father, Isaac Rousseau, though of a family which had emigrated from Paris, where they had been booksellers, and had for two hundred years enjoyed a highly respectable position in the bourgeoisie of Geneva, was regarded as rather frivolous. Probably that was because he varied his trade of watch-making by giving dancing-lessons. Dancing in the city of Calvin, in spite of the illustrious example of King David before the Ark of the Tabernacle, was regarded with little favour. He engaged in a quarrel with the retired Captain Goutier and they fought a duel contrary to the law. Goutier was wounded. On investigation Isaac was found guilty and condemned to beg pardon on his two knees. He chose to expatriate himself, and Jean Jacques went to live with his Uncle Bernard at 19, Grand’ Rue, and at Bossey with Pastor Lambercie. His education was not wholly neglected. He himself says: —
“At the age of seven I used to read books of history with my father. Plutarch became my favourite study. Agesilaus, Brutus, Aristotle were my heroes; from the discussions which these readings caused between my father and me, grew that free and republican spirit, that proud indomitable character, impatient of any yoke or servitude, which has so tormented me all the days of my life. Born a citizen of a republic, son of a father whose patriotism was his strongest passion, I took fire by his example; constantly occupied with Athens and Rome, I became the very person whose life I was reading; the story of the acts of constancy and bravery which struck me, made my eyes sparkle, my voice grow strong.”
Whatever his training really was, for he is not always a reliable chronicler of his own actions, he contrasts what he considered the ideal up-bringing of children as conducted in Switzerland with that of the French children. His words were destined to bear fruit: —
“Is it not supremely ridiculous to educate boys like young girls? Ah, it is truly fine to see these little twelve-year-old fops, walking out, their hands plump, their voices delicate (flutées), with pretty green parasols to protect them from the sun. They were less finical in my country: children, brought up in rustic fashion, had no complexions to preserve; they feared no harm from the air. Their fathers took them out hunting and gave them all kinds of exercise. They were reserved and modest in the presence of their elders; they were bold, proud, even quarrelsome, among themselves; they were rivals in wrestling, running, boxing; they were skilled in fencing. They came home rugged; they were genuine little rascals; but they grew into men whose hearts were full of zeal in their country’s service and ready to give their lives for her.”
In April, 1725, he was apprenticed to an engraver, named Abel Ducommun, Rue des Etuves, Number 96, third floor. He liked the trade, for, as he says, he had a lively taste for drawing; but his master was brutal, and at last, on a Sunday evening in March, 1728, having been locked out of the city through returning too late from a long walk beyond the walls and having spent the night wretchedly on the glacis “in a transport of despair” he suddenly swore never to return to his master’s. Rogers, in one of his poems, thus refers to this inhospitality on the part of Geneva, which, of course, was possible only in a small city surrounded with walls: —
“On my way I went.
Thy gates, Geneva, swinging heavily,
Thy gates so slow to open, swift to shut;
As on that Sabbath-eve when He arrived,
Whose name is now thy glory, now by thee
Such virtue dwells in those small syllables,
Inscribed to consecrate the narrow street.
His birth-place, – when but one short step too late,
In his despair, as though the die were cast,
He flung him down to weep and wept till dawn;
Then rose to go, a wanderer through the world.”
He wandered away till he came to the little Catholic town of Confignon, two leagues from Geneva, and became the guest and protégé of the vicar M. de Pontverre, who gave him delicious Frangi wine and attempted to convince him that the heresy of Geneva was ruinous to hopes of salvation.
“Though M. de Pontverre was a religious man,” says Rousseau, “he was not a virtuous man, but rather a bigot, who knew no virtue except worshiping images and telling his beads; in a word, a kind of missionary who thought it a supreme merit to compose libels against the ministers of Geneva. Far from wishing to send me back, he endeavoured to favour my escape and put it out of my power to return, even if I had been so disposed. There were a thousand chances to one that he was going to let me perish of starvation or become a rascal; all this was apart from his purpose: he saw a soul snatched from heresy and restored to the bosom of the Church: whether I were an honest man or a knave was immaterial, provided I went to mass.”
At Annecy was living Madame de Warens, who had robbed her husband of his forks, knives and spoons, involved him in debts, and deserted him for the sake of embracing Catholicism. She was earning a pension of two thousand francs a year from the King of Sardinia by using her new and fervent zeal in the work of propaganda. M. de Pontverre gave Rousseau a letter to the fair and frail baroness. This is what the vicar said: —
“I send you Jean Jacques Rousseau, a youth who has abandoned his country; he seems to me of a happy character. He spent a day with me; and God summons him to Annecy.
“Try to encourage him to embrace Catholicism. It is a triumph to bring about conversion. You will understand as well as I do that for this great work he must be kept at Annecy, for fear he may receive evil instructions elsewhere. Be careful to intercept all letters that might be written from his country, for if he thinks he is abandoned he will the sooner abjure. I put the whole matter into the hands of the Almighty and yours, which I kiss.”
“Madame de Warens at that time,” says Rousseau, “was young and charming; she was rich and noble; she had a naturally lively wit; she liked reading and pondering over what she read, devoting herself now to works of piety, now to the works of the learned Bayle, the Voltaire of his day; she was of a sweet disposition and her society was much sought; she had a good husband and they led an easy life together; her days were cast in a peaceful and prosperous epoch; she spent her best years in those enchanting scenes in the Pays de Vaud, where Lake Leman spreads its limpid waves, at the foot of the lofty mountains of Savoy, in a country fertile and productive.”
Not in too great a hurry to get there, sauntering along, stopping to earn a bite by singing under château windows, he finally, on Palm Sunday, met that paragon.
Years afterwards he asked himself why he could not enclose with a golden balustrade the happy spot where first he saw her and render it the object of universal veneration.
To many much of the spell of Switzerland comes from the magic of Rousseau’s love for the fair and facile deserter and from the immortal romance in which as Saint-Preux and Julie their idealized amour lived again. She must not escape us thus: we shall learn more of her in another place.
Rousseau declared that he expected to find a devout and forbidding old woman; instead he “saw a face beaming with charms, fine blue eyes full of sweetness, a complexion which dazzled the sight, the lovely lines of an enchanting bosom” and he was henceforth hers. She put him immediately at his ease and sent him a little later to Turin, where he felt himself constrained to sell his religion: it was at the price of his self-respect, but he did many things at that price first and last. More important in his development was his acquaintance with the Abbé Gaime, who, like so many abbés, was a deist and did not believe in supernatural revelation or in the miracles; but he seems to have been a man of high character whose principles often kept Rousseau from regrettable acts.
After his disappointing experiences in Turin, as draughtsman, footman, clerk, beggarman, thief, he returned to Annecy. Madame de Warens asked her cousin, M. d’Aubonne, “a man of great understanding and cleverness,” but an adventurer, to examine Rousseau as to whether it were best for him to be a merchant or an abbé or an engineer. Rousseau says: “The result of his observations was that, notwithstanding the animation of my countenance and promising exterior, I was, if not absolutely silly, at least a lad of very little sense and wholly lacking original ideas or learning.”
